"I don't like spring training, it's too long and you've got to get up too early," the Mariners' new designated hitter says. "I'm not a morning person."

Introducing myself, I tell him I'm from the Seattle P-I.

"P-I?!" he says. "Are you a private investigator?"

So it goes. In a wide-ranging interview lasting all of six or seven minutes, the Go 2 Guy discovered that Everett likes to fish and once caught an 80-pound grouper in Mexico.

He isn't big on golf but plays in some charity tournaments. As a 22-handicapper, Everett understands the difficulties of the game, yet still believes Tiger Woods is not an athlete because golf is a skill, not a sport -- no one is disrupting you and you're not playing against another person.

With an 8:15 team meeting rapidly approaching, I knew I was short on time and had to get to the meat of the matter, a July 2005 story in Maxim magazine in which Everett said a bunch of things that made you go "huh?"

Naturally I had to beat a dead dinosaur to death, wondering how he could deny that these prehistoric creatures existed when evidence shows otherwise.

"I don't go to that stuff," Everett said. "Do me a favor, the next time you see a paleontologist, ask him if they agree with one another."

What that meant, I have no idea.

Asked whether he had any regrets for what he said in Maxim, Everett said: "For what? Read the article. There should be no regrets."

Well, what about your views on homosexuality, that being gay is wrong?

"It's in the Bible," Everett said. "A woman and a woman can't have a baby, and a man and a man can't have a baby."

But what would you say to gay Mariners fans? Aren't you concerned about offending them?

"I didn't say nothing about the person," he said. "It's the act ...

"(People in) society are too afraid to say what's on their mind. You've always got to go with the popularity. If you don't agree, you're controversial."

Everett isn't a piece of work as much as a body of work, and I'm standing in front of the artist trying to grasp what he's attempting to say.

"What about your comments that it's been proven that 99 percent of baseball fans don't know what they're watching?" I ask.

I want to ask him, "proven by whom" but Everett launches into something about 99 percent of sportswriters not having a clue either, and our stories are the ones read by fans, so consequently ...

That line of thought somehow leads to Peter Gammons again. Everett ripped the Boston Globe baseball writer and ESPN commentator in Maxim, saying: "Peter Gammons sucks. He hears something and then throws it out there, and some of it is true, so it makes him sound like a genius. But he knows nothing. He knows nothing unless somebody tells him something. That's it."

No, there's more. "Peter talks because Peter can't write," Everett says on his first day at spring training. "Have you seen him in the clubhouse? I guarantee the guy's gonna say something about the Seattle Mariners. How can you believe what a guy says who's not here?

"Ninety-nine percent of things that are written about us are not seen. I take it as it goes. They (writers) never get it right."

I ask him: "If that's the case, what I plan to write about you has a 99 percent chance of being wrong?"

"To a degree, yeah," he says. "To a degree, it's gonna be B.S."

To a degree? B.S. is the foundation of this column!

Last seen on Wednesday afternoon, Everett for no good reason was asked if he watches "American Idol." He quickly said that he doesn't watch TV because there's nothing worth watching on TV, including Gammons no doubt.

There's nothing like "Bonanza" and "Gilligan's Island," shows he used to watch as a kid. Then he said something that finally made sense. "Ginger or Mary Ann," I asked.